Don’t Quote Me On That
E(i)ditorial — March 2017
Last Wednesday, the White House released a statement from Donald Trump in honor of Nowruz. The statement contained a cringe-inducing error: it included an apocryphal “famous” quote from sixth-century BCE Persian emperor Cyrus II:
Cyrus the Great, a leader of the ancient Persian Empire, famously said that ‘[f]reedom, dignity, and wealth together constitute the greatest happiness of humanity. If you bequeath all three to your people, their love for you will never die.’
As Taylor Wolford has reported on Mic, this quote is not actually from the famed founder of the Achaemenid dynasty. It seems to come from a 2012 Forbes listicle by Ryan Holiday, which borrows from Larry Hedrick’s Xenophon’s Cyrus the Great: The Arts of Leadership and War, a work loosely adapted from Xenophon’s Cyropaedia — which is, itself, a heavily fictionalized account of Cyrus II. In short, the connection between the quote and the historical Cyrus is so tenuous as to be practically nonexistent.
Classicists may be inclined to mock Trump for this snafu, which — admittedly — isn’t a good look. But focusing on the fact that whoever wrote that statement made an undergraduate essay-level mistake, while tempting, ultimately misses the point. The lesson we take from this incident shouldn’t only be that Donald Trump is the living embodiment of the argument in Harry Frankfurt’s On Bullshit — that much has been obvious for a long time, although writers have continued to breathlessly discover it.
First, this sort of mistake is bipartisan; Occupy Democrats, a liberal fake news site, recently shared a Cicero quote that turns out to be just as fabricated as the Cyrus quote. (Please, liberal friends: stop sharing Occupy Democrats posts. They give us all a bad name.) Admittedly, a meme shared on Facebook isn’t as potentially consequential as a statement issued by the President of the United States, but it at least shows that a weak knowledge of ancient literature fails to impede those across the political spectrum from using the ancient world to try to sound smart.
A more productive use of classicists’ critical energy would be to focus on two more sinister elements of this incident: the original Forbes listicle, and — most problematic of all — the use of Xenophon, real or fake, in a statement celebrating Nowruz.
The Forbes article by Ryan Holiday is completely inane. It represents a troubling mode of public Classics — listicles of ancient quotes, entirely divorced from their original contexts, served up without any interpretation or analysis. Holiday has made something of a career of pre-digesting classical texts and then regurgitating them as self-help manuals, and he’s a poor ambassador for our discipline.
In the article, Holiday calls Hedrick’s book an “excellent translation” of Xenophon’s original and defended himself to Mic last week by saying that Hedrick “clearly explains his source material and methods.” And, indeed, he does: Hedrick clearly states in his introduction that he “couched Xenophon’s story in language that today’s students and business professionals can readily digest” (xix), “extended the narrative at a few points” (xx), “added material … in the Old Testament” (xx), and “shift[ed] the book’s point of view into the first person” (xx). In short, Holiday’s use of Hedrick shows Holiday to be every bit as much of a bullshit artist as Trump. (Even Holiday’s controversial associate Tucker Max did a substantially better job reading Hedrick’s text, although he mistakenly calls the author “Hendrick.” I suspect that Holiday got the idea for his Forbes post from Max’s blog.)
It is to Forbes’ credit that they now have excellent, expert writers producing content about Classics for their site, including Sarah Bond and Kristina Killgrove. But there are plenty of articles like Holiday’s out there, on Forbes and elsewhere. Classicists could be doing much more than we are to counter this kind of abuse of the material we study.
But even if Trump had quoted Xenophon with perfect accuracy, classicists should still criticize the move, because using an ancient Greek historian to celebrate the Persian New Year is deeply problematic. It perpetuates racist, Eurocentric perceptions of a culture, instead of allowing Persians to speak for themselves.
Compared to some other portrayals of the Persians, Xenophon’s is refreshingly sympathetic and laudatory. Xenophon consistently presents his fictionalized Cyrus as an ideal leader, “worthy to be wondered at” (ἄξιον ὄντα θαυμάζεσθαι, 1.1.6). But the text still centers a Greek perspective on the Persians. And it’s still, ultimately, an invention by a Western individual about the life of Cyrus, just as Hedrick’s book is. (Some classicists even believe that Xenophon’s work represents “the first extant novel.”) Neither text represents any kind of historical fact, and neither represents the use of authentic Persian voices.
The risk in overvaluing the perspective of a writer like Xenophon is that we will perpetuate a cultural politics where Persia is valued because of the approbation of someone we recognize as more “Western” — that is, closer to America. I intentionally chose art for this editorial that would represent the same kind of rhetorical move as the Xenophon quote: Alexander’s admiration of Cyrus’ tomb has the same colonizing, Westernizing overtones. We should make sure to also celebrate images like this lovely photograph of the tomb (right) by Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji.
The celebration of Cyrus by the Trump administration is troubling for other reasons, as well. (Everyone should read Porochista Khakpour’s beautiful essay on why she feels conflicted about Nowruz this year.) Iran has been included in both iterations of Trump’s travel ban, and, as Trita Parsi, the president of the National Iranian American Council, told Wolford:
I appreciate that the president would try to quote Cyrus the Great. It would obviously be better if he had gotten a correct quote. But the fundamental problem we have is not with the statement per se, but the fact that the substance of his policy is damaging to U.S. national interests and it’s tearing Iranian-American families apart.
Also alarming is Trump’s unsubtle assimilation of himself to Cyrus. The quote itself, celebrating great leadership, seems to suggest that Trump considers himself a representation of Cyrus’ wisdom. The equation of Trump and Cyrus may seem absurdly incongruous to classicists, but it’s actually well-known within the evangelical community.
Last October, Lance Wallnau — holder of a doctorate from for-profit diploma mill Phoenix University — published an article with the title “Why I Believe Trump Is the Prophesied President.” Wallnau recounts how, after reflecting that Donald Trump would be the nation’s 45th president, “I heard the Spirit impress upon my mind, ‘Read Isaiah 45.’ To be honest, I didn’t recall what the chapter was about. I opened a Bible and began to read, ‘Thus saith the Lord to Cyrus whom I’ve anointed.’” Wallnau declares, “I believe the 45th president is meant to be an Isaiah 45 Cyrus.” It seems entirely plausible that whoever wrote the statement is aware of this widespread belief in the evangelical community, and intentionally crafted the statement as a dog-whistle.
The Trump administration may deserve to be mocked for its frequent displays of ignorance. But by focusing on the ridiculous elements of this story we run the risk of overlooking the more troubling and pernicious attitudes that underlie this act of quotation. The fact is, this misquote is as much the product of Eurocentrism and xenophobia as it is the byproduct of ignorance.
In March, Eidolon published six articles:
Johanna Hanink scrutinized the gender gap in big, public-facing classics books for her Disciplinary Action column in More Women Classicists Need to Write Big
Neville Morley critiqued the growing trend of comparing President Trump to Caligula and Nero in What Can Karl Marx Tell Us About Comparing Donald Trump to Roman Emperors?
Elena Giusti delved into the connections between the Augustan poetics she studies and the Italian media under Berlusconi in Altar of Facts
John Henry Silva argued that more veterans should study the classics in Semper Fidelis: How Classics Can Help Veterans
Philip Walsh gave a joyous account of his transition from college to high school teaching in Falling Up and Beginning Again: Teaching at an Independent School
James Nikopoulos explored his own ambivalence about his lack of facility with both Greek and ancient Greek On Not Wanting To Know Ancient Greek
Next month’s content will include the winning entry from our high school essay contest. As always, thank you for reading!
Donna Zuckerberg is the Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon. She received her PhD in Classics from Princeton and teaches for Stanford Continuing Studies and the Paideia Institute. Her book Not All Dead White Men, a study of the reception of Classics in Red Pill communities, is under contract with Harvard University Press. Read more of her work here.
